Soundtracked

Lucky Man

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This week's theme: The Precious Few

I don't know much, but I do know how to waste time, and I've done a fair bit of that in the just over two hours I've been awake so far today. Didn't even unplug the laptop from the TV until just now...I got so lazy, I was playing Candy Crush from across the room and I started using the on-screen keyboard instead of getting up to type things physically. It's a glorious sin.

And I still haven't come up with a song I feel like using today for "The Soundtrack of Your Life" . I gave myself one option yesterday, but of course I've changed my mind already because I've been in more of a Brit-pop mood than hip hop lately. My nighttime routine has consisted of British sitcoms that Hulu seems to think I'd enjoy...first it was Miranda  , and now it's The IT Crowd   (where I've developed a little crush on Katherine Parkinson ). Hulu also seems to think I've watched seven episodes of some show called Monday Monday   and keeps pushing me to watch it again. This is why I hate falling asleep with Hulu in charge .

I have figured out that I want to choose a song off of The Verve's Urban Hymns   record. Definitely an all-time favorite album, even if it's one I tend to forget about from time to time. I think in the US they've gotten buried behind Oasis and Radiohead and even Blur and other great bands from that era that I haven't spent much time listening to, like Pulp and Suede, because they didn't have as sustained a successful period. But what a time to not be British in the States for a music lover!

So I remember a lot from this time, actually. I'd just moved into my own place, went out and found a grown-up job all on my own for the first time rather than using connections, and decided that since I was between three girls in the most awkward love-rhombus (not even a damn triangle for chrissakes, because that's not complicated enough) ever during the holidays, I'd say fuck it and get trashed. Often. What had been the point of remaining sober and boring and alone, when I could go out with friends and have a good time, or even stay home and at least entertain myself more easily by seeing what kind of shenanigans drunk me could come up with? And I got outta control in a hurry.

I'd gone to Target one evening after a few beverages with the boys from work to see one of the aforementioned ladyfriends...who was decidedly not a fan of me showing up to her workplace smelling like a freshly-opened bottle of Crown Royal. In my defense, I was also making a purchase (Urban Hymns actually, because "Bitter Sweet Symphony"   was the jam going into '98.

So I'd go home and wait for the other girl to get off her shift at a local restaurant (it's kinda awkward showing up to a restaurant if you don't plan on eating there). Sometimes she'd stop over unannounced, just to hear "Shiny Happy People"   by REM or watch reruns of The Golden Girls  . Unless I was ending my evening with a few beers...and she didn't want any nor felt the need to stay long. But it was a different story when she was drunk though... that's how it goes sometimes.

And the third girl? I didn't understand it. She'd moved away for school and then showed up at my door once with a Christmas present. How she knew my address and why I was drinking a wine cooler in the middle of the afternoon on the day of some peoples' lord and savior's birth are a couple of life's greatest questions .

I went in that Xmas evening for a shift at my second job, a local gas station/convenience store. I figured it'd be dead in there...holidays, overnight, not a really busy area. I lugged in my radio and my new copy of Urban Hymns, visited the back cooler, and kicked back with a six-pack of Budweiser. There's "time-and-a-half" holiday pay, and then there's my sort of "time-and-a-half" pay, with benefits .

Let me tell you...that cd is an absolute joy to get hammered to at work (and that's a sentence you don't see often ). Well, not just joy...it carries you through a full range of emotions. You're hitting every touchstone on the path to somewhere uncertain, but you know you want to be going there. You're hopeful, you're lost, you're found, you're unsure and unstable, you're ready to fight someone with your bare hands, then you wanna dance through a field arm-in-arm with them, and then you're ready to pass out in front of a television right before the national anthem plays and the screen becomes images of test patterns for the next six hours. And then you wake up and realize you've just had the best dream ever, only it wasn't really a dream even though you didn't do any of those things...but the door chimes are ringing and the delivery guy is dropping off the morning's batch of newspapers, so you'd better get back to work and finish cleaning out all the coffee pots and get that brewin' before the boss shows up. And don't forget to take out the trash and the empty beer cans.

It was like that for a couple months. I didn't work at the gas station often- maybe one or two nights a week- but there was always some kind of nonsense going on there. Tossing a basketball all over the parking lot, having a war in the entire store with a box of water toys (those little sorta-foamish cloth-covered balls that you're supposed to only throw around in a swimming pool), crackin' beers with my homies, hookin' up with drunk coworkers away from the security cameras when they stop in at 4am just because you're working. That place was a freaking mess...but I loved it. I tried quitting once when my regular job gave me a substantial raise, but my boss wouldn't let me because he didn't want to hire anyone else, and the assistant manager didn't want to go back to third shift. They were like "You don't even have to do any work...just watch the register, make coffee, and don't get robbed." Easy enough. Stuck it out as long as I could and had almost all the fun a person could possibly have at some kinda gig like that, until I absolutely no longer needed the job and my boss got fired for misappropriating pizza funds (I couldn't even possibly make that up...he would buy a pizza or two from the place down the street to resell the slices in-store, which was perfectly acceptable by corporate's standards, but he made it look like he was buying a lot more pizza than he actually was, and pocketing the rest of the cash...and somehow even though the accounting system was archaic and flawed he got caught). I couldn't have picked a better time to bail.

Anyway, I guess I should pick a song to tie off this entry like the balloon animal it is. "Bitter Sweet Symphony" would be the obvious choice, but everyone's god damn lives are bittersweet and follow the same basic roads the lyrics describe. "The Rolling People"   is my personal favorite off the album, and the chorus describes my friends and I all well and it has some great lyrics ("I'll be the first to toast, yeah, to my rotten soul!" ), but it doesn't fit this particular entry in my opinion. "Sonnet", "The Drugs Don't Work", "One Day", "Velvet Morning"...all amazing, and all of them have their own stories attached to them. "Lucky Man" may just sum up everything in general. Sometimes I can admit that I've been though some excellent experiences as well as some really shitty ones. There's a sort of balance at play, even though there's a tendency to sit on the side of the negative things in order to make more sense of them rather than just lay back and take a bath on the fun side of the scale. We're all guilty of that...plopping our asses down in the bullshit thinking that'll help us dig out from it. Naw man, we just have to figure out how to roll over to the other plate to offset that. That's all. Easier said than done...don't I know it .

"Happiness...more or less.
It's just a change in me; something in my liberty."
Lyrics.  

And I read the other day that The Verve's singer, Richard Ashcroft, is working on new solo music (no offense Charlie ~ , but when I first started reading your blog years ago during the first Soundtrackers thing he's who I pictured you more to look like... my bad). I wasn't crazy about some of his other stuff, but I heard a snippet of a new song in this NME interview   and it sounds kinda interesting...so I'll check it out. Eventually ...I've got too much other stuff goin' on today that can't be put off much longer. I have to catch up on "Give It 100!" , I need to figure out which poem I really want to read for Elle - on hiatus 's "Poetry Readings"  and decide if I'm gonna try to record again today while the lighting in my place is still decent (and I tried reading/recording "Good Ideas"  last night, but the end result is awful and I've decided when my Greatest Poetry Hits DVD collection comes out that clip'll show up on there as an outtake) provided I also learn how to read (amazing how the fundamentals are always the first to go ), I have to edit my feature for this month's Blogging Bliss newsletter (catch some archived issues here: "Blogging Bliss Newsletter Archives" ), there are tabs open from items I was tagged in yesterday that I need a li'l attention, I should probably update my team's playlist for "The Soundtrack of Your Life" , and Nixie Martell cheerleader says I need to write my mom a message this evening 'cuz my primary care doctor said I'm not gonna die of anything too serious in the near future. So as you can see, I'm clearly running out of time to waste, and I must go do other things now. GOODNIGHT NOW!! (Feels weird typing that here; not gonna lie. It's been awhile since I took "Still Figurin' Out Who I Think I Am"  semi-seriously .)

Rooftop hockey...one of the few non-achievements in my convenience store career.